likearock

But doesn't hatred often manifest itself towards groups of people, rather than just an individual? Certainly, the "hate crimes" legislation I've seen is geared towards hatred that may be directed against others who have done you no harm and who only earn your hatred by virtue of their ethnicity or religion. That seems to be a major part of what people react to in Wright's sermons. Is there a psychological distinction between hating an individual and hating an entire group?

IMHO I think there is hate, but considering many African Americans have been lynched, killed, segregated and raped believe they have something to be pissed at. Okay, then. There's something in those segments that leads you to say they are hateful. What exactly is it? It's not enough to point to the motivations behind it, the lynchings and all the other past cruelty. Not every black person reacts to those circumstances the same way. Some will react with anger and hate. Some will react with anger but not with hate. MLK, Obama, and several others showed us yet another way to react. Of course, he personally has not committed atrocities. Many white preachers who preach hatefully also have not personally committed atrocities but it doesn't make their speeches any less hateful. In any case, the measure of whether something is "hate speech" does not require that the speaker himself has acted upon it. The fact that it can inspire others to act violently is perhaps what makes it hateful. For someone like Obama, who promises us so much in terms of healing the racial divide, shouldn't he be very clear about calling out hate speech no matter how justifiable its origins? I think his recent speech was a good start, but he kind of pulled his punches when he dismissed Wright's inflamatory sermons as merely "divisive". If they were hateful, they should be labeled as such.

Interesting you should bring that up. I haven't been bothered by spam in quite a while. Maybe the law did do something. I must be doing something wrong. I get spammed constantly Here's a tip: never ever allow your email address to be published on a web page. Even DZ.com's profiles, while they're password protected, are not immune to automated web crawlers.

Interesting you should bring that up. I haven't been bothered by spam in quite a while. Maybe the law did do something.

When we hear angry white Republican Evangelicals railing against America (in terms of allowing rights to homos) & saying it caused 9/11 & Hurricane Katrina, some of the Republicans are all for it. It sounds like you're saying that the above represents speech that is hateful. But, in spite of the fact that the substance of this thread is about hate, you don't even mention the word. Why is that?

An excellent analysis and worth repeating. Obama, if he truly wants to get to an America that is "post-racial", would be wise to pick up on it. He could be the the poster child for how culture, not race determines the quality of life. BTW, consider what your reaction would be had I called him a poster boy. In spite of the fact that poster boy is a legitimate, non-pejorative term, I have no doubt that the PC police would label that as racist.

One of the things that struck me about his speech were the words Obama used to characterize the most inflammatory of Wright's statements. He called them controversial and divisive, and also spoke of the anger that was behind them. He did not call them hateful, however. This was somewhat conspicuous since he did talk about the "hateful ideologies of radical Islam" in the same speech. So my question is simple: when do statements like those of Wright go beyond being angry and become hateful? Were they in fact hateful? When we hear angry white people railing against blacks, we seem to have no problem in recognizing the hatred behind it. Do we have a double standard when it's the other way around? For those who argue this is just semantics, I disagree. American culture and its underlying psychology make significant distinctions based on the presence or absence of hatred. Hate crimes have stricter punishments than equivalent crimes committed without hatred. It's a lot easier to sympathize with someone who's angry than with someone who's consumed with hate.

I've not switched up. I readily acknowledged that I don't have sufficient information about Saudi Arabia. Nor has such information been provided in this thread. I have no reason to believe that Islam fundamentalists are anything other than a fringe phenomenon in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, and without credible evidence to the contrary, it would not be logical for me to reject that hypothesis. Amazing. Congratulations, you win! Your persistence in the face of all that pesky evidence is remarkable indeed. Your prize is the coveted Wisdom of the Ostrich award. Enjoy.

My bad. I didn't have occasion to see the speech and clearly went through the transcript too quickly. He did a good job. Was it good enough? Time will tell. I guess that psychanalytic side of me still wants to know how he could compartmentalize the hateful side of his pastor to remain in the church as long as he did.

What a joke. Seems that the candidate who bills himself as best equipped for commander in chief doesn't understand that Al Qaeda and Iran are fighting on different sides. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/mccain-misspeaks-on-iran-al-qaeda/ McCain Misspeaks on Iran, Al Qaeda By Michael Cooper JERUSALEM — Senator John McCain’s trip overseas was supposed to highlight his foreign policy acumen, and his supporters hoped that it would showcase him as a statesman, allowing him to meet with world leaders as the Democrats squabble. But all did not go according to plan on Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when Mr. McCain, fresh from a visit to Iraq, misidentified some of the key players in the Iraq war. Mr. McCain said several times during his visit to Jordan – during a news conference and a radio interview — that he was concerned that Iran was training members of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training and financing Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, which is a Sunni insurgent group. “We continue to be concerned about Iranian taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back,’’ Mr. McCain said at the news conference. Asked about that statement, Mr. McCain said: “Well, it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” It was not until he got a whispered correction from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was traveling with Mr. McCain on the trip, which is a Congressional delegation, that Mr. McCain corrected himself. “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda,” he said. Mr. McCain has based his campaign in large part on his assertion that he is the best prepared candidate to deal with Iraq, and the Democrats wasted little time in jumping on his misstatement to question his knowledge and judgment. “After eight years of the Bush Administration’s incompetence in Iraq, McCain’s comments don’t give the American people a reason to believe that he can be trusted to offer a clear way forward,” Karen Finney, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. “Not only is Senator McCain wrong on Iraq once again, but he showed he either doesn’t understand the challenges facing Iraq and the region or is willing to ignore the facts on the ground.” Mr. McCain made similar comments about Iran training Al Qaeda on Monday in an interview with the Hugh Hewitt Show, a radio program he called into from Amman. “As you know, there are Al Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran, given training as leaders, and they’re moving back into Iraq,’’ he said, according to a transcript posted on the show’s Web site. Mr. McCain traveled to Iraq as part of a fact-finding mission with a Congressional delegation, went from there to Jordan, and then here to Israel, where Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, and met with President Shimon Peres of Israel. Noting that Mr. McCain, and Arizona Republican, had been hopping all over the Middle East, Mr. Peres told him: “I really admire your courage and stamina.’’

I still don't think Obama is being straight with us. He did sit through some of those anti-white sermons, it's just not credible that he could have avoided all of them. However, my guess is that it made him uncomfortable to hear, especially since he has a white mother. If he just came clean with that kind of admission, I think he could finally get past this.

Forgive me if I don't consider a two page article in Time magazine to be a credible primary source of information about a culture that Americans are largely ignorant of. Having said that, I read the article, and it doesn't paint the same bleak picture you've been attempting to paint. Yeah, that's not too bad. After all, "extremism is, by definition, a fringe phenomenon." Don't look now, but your selected quote does little to support your assertion that a significant proportion of Saudi Arabians are radicals. If you read the article, it also says the Saudi government has been taking steps to crack down on extremism. Wow, way to switch it up. The debate was always about whether religious extremism was a significant portion of Saudi culture, which you consistently claimed was a fringe phenomenon. Rather than provide any supporting evidence to back up your view, you point to the typical lip service that Saudi officials have always been giving for Western consumption. Of course, you ignore the fact that the reason they need to give this lip service is because there already is a significant problem.

Forgive me if I don't consider a two page article in Time magazine to be a credible primary source of information about a culture that Americans are largely ignorant of. Having said that, I read the article, and it doesn't paint the same bleak picture you've been attempting to paint. Yeah, that's not too bad. After all, "extremism is, by definition, a fringe phenomenon."

I see. So the fact that Japanese started the war in the first place does not in any way change the moral equivalence you insist exists?

I've never been to Saudi Arabia, and have never claimed to have made such observations. In lieu of credible evidence to the contrary, I'm not going to accept that the majority of citizens in Saudi Arabia are radical fundamentalist Muslims; it's not probable. Have you been over there in, say, the last decade? No, but the author of that Time magazine article was. You know, one of the numerous sourced arguments presented in this thread that you've chosen to trim from your reply rather than address. I guess anything that doesn't correspond with your point of view is automatically seen to be "non-credible".

We don't have many good sources readily available to us, which is a big part of the problem. Our best sources of information are those that have been there, and made their own observations with an open mind. So post these "fair and balanced" observations of yours. I'm sure we'd all be very interested in where you get your conviction that religious extremism is a fringe phenomenon in Saudi Arabia.

From your source: The neutrality of this article is disputed. About the only thing the editors seem to agree on is that the article is inaccurate. You should probably take the claims within with a grain of salt. Okay, you don't like Wikipedia, how about Time magazine? N.B. It's kind of lame to keep criticizing my sources without providing any of your own to offer a counter argument.

Extremism is, by definition, a fringe phenomenon. Still, we're talking about a region, not one or two specific countries. No, extremism is not by definition a fringe phenomenon. The only thing it is by definition is extreme. There are many examples in history of nations that have been in the thrall of extremism. This is such a case: That's a lot more than a "fringe" phenomenon.

As indicated by the civil unrest caused by the assassination of the opposition candidate? Or the defeat of Musharraf in the recent elections? If there just as bad as Saudi Arabia, that would indicate that extremism does not make up the majority belief in either country. So you believe that Wahhabi madrassas are a fringe phenomenon in those two countries?

How about right here http://www.jfednepa.org/mark%20silverberg/wahhabi.html Sorry, but that's not evidence indicating majority of their population Muslim extremists. It also fails to address the rest of the Middle East, only Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is just as bad.

By that logic, you would have us condemn the Allied forces during WW II, who killed quite a deal more than 100,000.

Actually we do. But here, like over there, "scores of religious and educational institutions" are still a tiny minority. Yeah, right. All those Wahhabi madrassas in Saudi Arabia preaching jihad are just a drop in the bucket.

Actually, Al Quaeda might agree with you on part of this, ironically. Osama & Al Quaeda's goal is to destroy the House of Saud. They see America as propping up what they feel to be an evil ruler. There you go: the Law of Unintended Consequences. Wake me up when Iran annexes the Shiite portion of Iraq.

?? And Union soldiers didn't do the same with Confederate soldiers? Really quite a stretch to equating the Confederacy with Islamic extremists who deliberately target innocent civilians.

Perhaps, perhaps not. The fact that Obama was brought up by a single mom is well known. Equally well known is the prominence of this Reverend in so many aspects of his life. You don't base a book called "The Audacity of Hope" upon the teachings of someone who is not a major influence upon you. Guilt by association - it's The American Way Pay attention, John: That's hardly guilt by association. Sorry, was not directed at you in particular - more of a general comment of the fuss being made by the media and others. McCain is not responsible for the garbage spewed by Cunningham UNLESS he put him up to it. Hillary C. is not responsible for Ferraro's comments UNLESS she put her up to it.. Obama is not responsible for garbage comments made by Wright UNLESS he put him up to it.. No argument. But anyone who thinks the Wright factor hasn't hurt Obama has their head in the sand. I said I wasn't a republican, well I'm not a democrat either. And this election will not be decided by the Keith Olbermanns or the Bill O'Reillys of the country but by the large number of independents like me who aren't dismissing either Obama or McCain at this point. So while the Olbermann clan may turn a blind eye to this issue, many independents will be rightfully concerned about the tremendous contrast between the hateful rhetoric of the pastor and the healing, unifying message of the parishioner who sat for those sermons over so many years. It would be wise for the Obama team to start being proactive and to prepare a speech where the candidate will do whatever is necessary to be completely transparent about his relationship with Wright. Make no mistake about it, this issue will come back with a vengeance in the general election and Obama has to do better than he has been doing on this.